Charlie's Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography of The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts

Product Information

Friday’s sales were dwarfed by the previous day’s bids, on which the gavel could be heard knocking on in-demand copies of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.

Charlie Watts’ book collection to be sold at Christie’s

while both Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood suggested the Rolling Stones simply couldn’t continue without him, a theory that’s presumably now going to be tested: “Charlie’s the engine,” said Wood in 2003. Watts began hitting the bottle, and – shockingly for anyone who knew him – developed a heroin habit, though never on a scale to match that of Richards. Unusually, Charlie was present at the record company party, where Chuck asked him in small talk ‘How’s it going, man? In 1962, Jones formed the Rolling Stones with singer Jagger, pianist Ian Stewart and guitarists Keith Richards and Dick Taylor. Everyone who met him in life agrees that he was a truly likeable man — self-effacing and gentlemanly in a very English way.On the one hand, there are ‘completists’ who aim to amass perfect sets within their field of interest: an artefact from every Apollo mission, say, or a print of all known Ravilious woodcuts. A meeting with Jagger and Richards prompted the formation of the Rolling Stones, although it was a few months before the cautious Watts could be induced to leave Korner’s band to join them, which he eventually did in January 1963.

Charlie Watts, Bedrock Drummer for the Rolling Stones, Dies Charlie Watts, Bedrock Drummer for the Rolling Stones, Dies

He remained a devoted husband and father (later grandfather) and maintained friendships that stretched back to childhood. In this day and age it’s very easy to play, because …’ Here came another of his unexpected pauses and changes of direction. He was behind the creative process, that mega-touring, those stages, before U2, before any of those guys,’ she says. The pair prospered, moving from a Regent’s Park flat to a Sussex mansion and finally to a Devon farm, where Shirley established an upmarket stud farm of Arabian horses.

A pre-publication “proof” copy, inscribed by Waugh to his close friend and wartime commander Robert Laycock: “For Bob, Commander of the Faithful, from Evelyn. Watts turned down the group’s first offer for him to join, finally conceding and playing his first gig with them in January 1963. Partial arrangements for 31 compositions, approximately 88 pages in total; discovered in a storage locker in Chicago. The most legendary story about Watts – the possibly apocryphal one about him losing his temper when Mick Jagger referred to him as “my drummer”, punching him in the face and telling him he was, in fact, Watts’s singer – is legendary because it seemed so utterly out of character. Nothing if not a quick student, Watts not only learned to rock, but came to be hailed as one of the greatest drummers in rock history – sometimes the greatest of all – although he certainly occupied a unique place within that particular pantheon.